Russian Vigilantes Fight Drug Dealers

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Igor G. Varov, wearing a pistol on his hip, opens the sun roof of his big Mercedes 600 to remove the illegal flashing light he uses to maneuver through traffic on the icy streets of this industrial city in the Ural Mountains.

He and his colleague, Andrei V. Kabanov, are on the prowl in a poor neighborhood where the heroin addicts are out at dusk searching for dealers in the snowy courtyards and darkened stairwells. ''Look, there's some addicts,'' he says, as the silver sedan careered into the alley next to a dilapidated apartment block.

Two teenage boys eye their arrival warily. Mr. Varov and Mr. Kabanov jump out and start barking orders in almost one voice. ''Get over here! Show me your arms. Tell me where they are selling drugs, and don't lie.'' Mr. Varov is unfazed by protests from the teenagers -- one is visibly shaking -- that they are not addicts and do not know where drugs are being sold.

Two other young men approach, believing that they have also been summoned by Mr. Kabonov's repeated shouts to ''get over here!'' But now Mr. Varov wheels toward them. ''What are you doing here? Get out of here or I will break your legs.''

Here at the crossroads of Asia and Europe, where the supply lines of opium and heroin out of Central and South Asia run into big population centers near the frontier of the drug trade, a group of tough guys have organized themselves as a foundation called City Without Drugs. They are leading a brutal civic campaign to take the streets of Yekaterinburg back from the drug dealers and the corrupt policemen who are widely believed to be protecting them.

''We call ourselves the angered public,'' said Mr. Varov, 36, who runs a construction materials company. ''And we are doing this for people who want to be rid of these drug dealers. We go to these drug selling sites with baseball bats and flashlights and find out where the drug dealers are and beat them like wild dogs.''

In the lawless vacuum that afflicts much of Russia today, Mr. Varov and Mr. Kabanov regularly incite acts of vigilante violence against drug dealers. They have also founded a drug treatment center where addicts are forced to withdraw from heroin use cold turkey while handcuffed to their beds -- or sometimes just to the nearest radiator.

They, and a loose knit band of business associates, are a sign of the jarring social transition under way in many parts of the country where vigilante violence and paramilitary organizations have assumed a greater role in policing and guarding Russian business people and ordinary citizens. But sometimes they turn on these people and extort money from them.

Not long ago, Mr. Varov went on television and said that if the drug idemic raging here ever touched his own family, the top law enforcement officer in the region, Gen. Aleksei A. Krasnikov, ''would not live beyond that day.''

They are up-from-nowhere street toughs, gang leaders or sportsmen who in the last decade have muscled their way into one business or another. As their power and wealth have grown, they have embraced religion or taken up public causes. In some cases this was genuine, but in others it was a means to clean up their image and wrap themselves in the mantle of public-spiritedness while staving off prosecutions.

''We are all for killing drug dealers on the spot without trial because they are poisoning our children,'' says Mr. Kabanov, 40, a onetime professional card player and former heroin addict himself, who built a yacht club for the region's nouveaux riches.

He dresses in a natty black outfit under a stubble of red beard that enhances his roguish presentation. He and Mr. Varov have determined that the heroin plague that is sweeping across Russia is a conspiracy by Muslim nations and Chechen warlords to lay low their motherland.

There is no dispute about the problem they confront. The opening of borders and of formerly closed cities in Russia, along with the collapse of the Soviet-era economy, ignited a wave of illicit trade in everything for which there is a market in the world -- arms, drugs and prostitution.

In the space of less than a decade, the number of heroin addicts here rose to an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 from a few dozen. The number of drug addicts across the country is expected to reach three million in Russia this year. That is well behind the United States, where there are an estimated 12 million drug users, but the rate of growth in Russia is phenomenal.

In the first half of 1999, heroin use in Russia was up 4.5 times compared with the same period in 1998. And the number of H.I.V. infections, many of them from shared needles, doubled in 1999, according to an Interior Ministry report issued in November.

In a country where alcoholism already is rampant, a culture of soaring drug addiction is gaining ground, further undermining the basic health of the nation. Russia is suffering such a sharp rise in overall mortality and declining birth rates that the average life expectancy for Russian men has declined to 61.3 years. For women it is 72.9 years.

''This is one of the most serious problems facing the country because it could take away an entire generation of Russians,'' said Boris M. Tepliakov, a psychiatrist and the head of the state-run hospital here that treats drug addicts.

The loss of government control, or feckless enforcement by the central and regional law enforcement authorities, has given rise to the spread of gangs and private security that who assert their own authority. On some days, it is difficult to sort out the criminals from the noncriminals. Mr. Varov and his associates say they stepped into the vacuum last summer, when the law enforcement authorities were either overwhelmed or unwilling to act.

They teamed up with another business syndicate here called Uralmash, and together they sent several hundred security guards from their various enterprises to the Gypsy Village neighborhood that serves as the center of the drug trade in the city.

The security guards beat some suspected drug dealers and went to the homes of others, threatening to burn them down if drug dealing did not stop. Not long after, Uralmash security guards who patrol an open-air market on the other side of town seized a suspected drug dealer.

They tied him to a tree, hung a sign on him saying he was poisoning the city's youth, and pulled his pants down and jabbed old hypodermic needles into his hind quarters while a film crew was summoned from a local television station.

A few weeks ago, City Without Drugs lent its expertise, and perhaps some of its muscle, to a civic group in the nearby town of Reftinski, where 18 suspected drug sellers were taken to a wooded area and severely beaten.

Though incidents of vigilantism have been aired in the local news media, neither the governor nor the mayor has commented on them. Both declined requests for interviews.

A senior police official, Fedor S. Anikeyev, said he had received ''unofficial'' reports of vigilantism. The police were powerless to act unless one of the beaten drug dealers walked into the police station to swear out a complaint, which was not likely, he said, because that would only subject him to further threats and beatings.

By all accounts here, the anti-drug crusade has significant public support -- although it is impossible to measure -- from citizens who are struggling in an economy of high unemployment, industrial contraction and cynicism toward anyone who claims to be working for the public good.

Mothers of drug-ravaged teenagers have staged rallies and organized drug patrols in courtyards and apartment stairwells. An electronic pager system set up by City Without Drugs to enable the public to inform on drug dealers has received more than 6,000 calls since last fall.

''It was only when this group got active that the police started to do anything,'' said an elderly taxi driver named Anatoly, who has driven the streets here most of his life.

One of the most prominent figures supporting City Without Drugs is Aleksandr Khabarov. A decade or so ago he founded the Uralmash gang, reputed to be an organization of small-time racketeers that came from the sports clubs in the industrial neighborhoods near the Uralmash heavy machinery plant here.

Through the years, Uralmash started many legitimate enterprises, and by 1993 Mr. Khabarov was running for Parliament. He is still running. During last December's balloting, a majority of the voters in his district marked ''none of the above'' and the election was voided. It has been rescheduled for March 26.

Mr. Khabarov's security forces added their muscle to those mobilized by City Without Drugs for an assault in September on Gypsy Village.

The building that houses the City Without Drugs clinic is a rundown former kindergarten on a small wooded plot in a village on the outskirts the city. It is surrounded by weathered cottages on whose roofs the late winter snow is heaped like layers of meringue.

A total of 47 recovering addicts are in residence, making it the largest such facility in the city. The withdrawal regime that begins with bread-and-water rations and handcuffs is free.

Sergei Kobyakov, 19, is handcuffed to the bed nearest the front window in the dormitory where the addicts spend their first two weeks. He had been shooting up for four years. Getting heroin in his neighborhood, he said, was as easy as ''buying a pack of cigarettes.'' He decided to subject himself to handcuffs because other clinics had failed him and ''because I have a great desire to cure this addiction.''

He wants to become a truck driver. His eyes look out from hollowed sockets after four sleepless nights of pain and the insomnia of withdrawal. ''I think my life will get better,'' he says, ''If you lie here in handcuffs, you understand what it is and that you want to end it.''

Dr. Tepliakov, the chief narcologist in the regional government, is highly critical of the withdrawal regime at the clinic. ''I thank God that no one has died there,'' he said, ''but if someone does, it is going to be a big scandal.'' He calls the City Without Drugs methods dangerous and ''illiterate,'' and he condemns the vigilantism that is taking hold.

''For me, let the devil himself fight this evil, but by civilized means,'' he said.

Back in the city, in the curtained alcove of a restaurant, Natalia Zernova, a journalist who has been chronicling the life of this city for three decades, tried to explain how the explosion of drug addiction here set off not only a vigilante-style response, but also political recriminations over the failure of government.

''The Russian mentality demands action because we always demand a strong hand,'' Ms. Zernova said, ''It is a tragedy that we have come to vigilantism. Unfortunately, for the people who founded this movement, vigilantism is part of their mentality, and no matter how they try to appear as civilized people, their criminal past is written on their faces and in their actions.''

But Ms. Zernova's reservations about the leaders of the anti-drug movement still do not overcome her basic support for their actions, and this was a common thread in interviews conducted during a visit to the city in February.

''All in all, I think it is better to do something than nothing at all,'' she said. ''In a country where the use of physical violence is the norm, using force against drug dealers is not going to cause any anger.''

Added 16-year-old Leonid A. Pavlukov, a lanky student who goes to one of the best high schools here and wants to become a lawyer: ''Thanks to the activities of this foundation, people are afraid of selling drugs. Of course it is not ideal that they are beating people, but Russia is in a period of transition and so long as there are no good laws on the books, and so long as the police are corrupt, it seems to me that it is acceptable to use vigilantism to fight against the drug problem.''

Andrei Sannikov is the local television journalist who first put City Without Drugs on the air, including the footage of alleged payments to the police, a broadcast for which he is now under formal investigation by the city prosecutor for possible ''slander'' against the ''honor of the uniform.''

''This campaign has created a unity that you won't see in any other sphere of public life,'' Mr. Sannikov said in his studio, from which he has also shown his viewers exclusive footage of vigilante raids. In these raids, masked men burst into the apartments of suspected drug dealers, beating and kicking them in the face, head and groin.

Mr. Sannikov's program also runs ads for the private business ventures of Mr. Varov and his colleagues at City Without Drugs, in what has become a symbiotic relationship. ''We are in a condition of war in this city, and war is not aesthetic; it is frightening.'' he said. ''If we were to keep silent and not show what was really happening, we would not change the consciousness of the people.''